Great Throughts Treasury

"A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage."

"A man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it."

"A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes."

"A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk is always a man who gains something and gives up something so long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape."

"A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy."

"A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool."

"A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men… he is the un-candid candid friend; the man who says, I am sorry to say we are ruined, and is not sorry at all…Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men."

"A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen."

"A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter."

"A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve."

"A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both."

"A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the lady who smashes American bars with an axe. In these discussions it is almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. With this I should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine. And for this reason: If a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional; something he does not expect every hour of the day; something which, unless he is a little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day. But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without; something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being without. The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary."

"A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice."

"A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things."

"A queer and almost mad notion seems to have got into the modern head that, if you mix up everybody and everything more or less anyhow, the mixture may be called unity, and the unity may be called peace. It is supposed that, if you break down all doors and walls so that there is no domesticity, there will then be nothing but friendship. Surely somebody must have noticed by this time that the men living in a hotel quarrel at least as often as the men living in a street."

"A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything."

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

"A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything."

"A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard."

"A stiff apology is a second insult The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt"

"A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality."

"A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching."

"A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed, but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttlefish."

"A tragedy means always a man's struggle with that which is stronger than man."

"A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished."

"A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition."

"A yawn is a silent shout."

"Absentee Fathers - What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible."

"Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity."

"According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it."

"Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told."

"After all I think I will not hang myself today."

"All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks."

"All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it."

"All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national."

"All good was a remnant."

"All government is an ugly necessity."

"All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them."

"All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never get there."

"All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive."

"All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot."

"All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing."

"All the terms used in the science books, 'law,' 'necessity,' 'order,' 'tendency,' and so on, are really unintellectual .... The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic."

"All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, Do it again; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, Do it again to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance."

"All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion."

"Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?"

"America has a genius for the encouragement of fame."

"America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement."

"America is the only country ever founded on a creed."

"Among the very rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."